Ready or Not, Here Comes the Fox Business Network

All week long, I’d been sporadically watching Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox Business Network, which made its debut on Monday. I was trying to figure out what, exactly, it was trying to do — and who its audience was supposed to be. It wasn’t an easy task.

One minute Fox was doing a segment that included a $1 million diamond; the next it was giving tips on how to avoid foreclosure. It would home in on the stock market and then report on the death of a teenager in Virginia from a staph infection, reports that included several truly silly efforts to frame the tragedy as a business story. On Tuesday afternoon, while CNBC was dissecting Intel’s earnings, Fox was running its “Happy Hour” show, which is set in a bar. A co-host named Cody, a dude so hip he doesn’t tuck his shirt in, was interviewing a random customer about his plans for Christmas spending. “Expensive chocolates,” was the man’s reply.

The only commonality was tone. In a week when Countrywide’s chief executive was discovered to be under S.E.C. investigation, when the market lost about 4 percent of its value, when evidence emerged that the housing slump was deepening, the tone at Fox Business was upbeat. Relentlessly, incorrigibly, unapologetically upbeat.

On Thursday afternoon, Fox put on what it trumpeted as a “rare live interview” with Warren Buffett. The interviewer was Liz Claman, an on-air hire from CNBC — indeed, Thursday was her first day on the job. In a preview a few hours earlier, Ms. Claman had promised a rock ’em, sock ’em interview, in which she vowed to ask “the greatest investor of all time,” as the Fox hosts kept calling him, all sorts of tough questions.

But when the cameras rolled to begin the interview, she turned positively giddy. “I’m so happy to be part of Fox Business,” she began breathlessly. Not surprisingly, her hardball questions for Mr. Buffett soon turned to mush. When he declined to answer a question about which currency he was interested in, he barely had to explain his rationale for not answering. She did it for him! She was so ingratiating, it was painful to watch.

Finally, I muted the television. But I would occasionally glance up at the TV and read the little headlines that were running under the interview. “Thinks Coca-Cola is a great business,” read one. “Newspaper industry has changed in the last 30 yrs,” read another. “Buying on margin is crazy.” To which the only appropriate response is: “Duh!”

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I know, I know: it is unfair to judge a new cable channel by its first week. What was ESPN like its first week? Or CNN? Or, for that matter, CNBC? Start-ups are never pretty.

In its early years, let’s remember, CNBC was a business channel that lacked focus and identity. It had only one program, which ran all day, handed off from host to host. “It was called ‘Money Wheel,’” recalled the star reporter, David Faber. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that CNBC began introducing programs with distinct identities, and began focusing maniacally on the stock market. That’s when it became a success. The irony, of course, is that the man in charge of CNBC when all that happened was Roger Ailes, who’s now running Fox Business.

“My core talent is that I’m a pretty good TV producer,” Mr. Ailes said the other day. He had made his name as a take-no-prisoners adman for a series of Republican presidents, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. “Bob Wright called me because they were failing,” he continued, referring to the former NBC chief executive, Robert Wright. “I started ‘Squawk Box.’ I started ‘Power Lunch.’ Maria Bartiromo was a producer. I put her on the air.”

Mr. Ailes was speaking from his office on the second floor of the News Corporation skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, where, after leaving CNBC in 1996, he first plotted the rise of Fox News, and is now doing the same with his new baby. Given what he did at Fox News, where he used a combination of vitriol and flag-waving to make Fox the No.1 all-news channel — while decimating the longtime leader CNN — no one takes Mr. Ailes lightly, least of all the folks at CNBC.

So far, though, the main thing Mr. Ailes has succeeded in doing is throw mud at his new competition. This is something he’s always been very good at it; he does start-ups like the political pro he used to be. On Monday, for instance, Bill Carter of The New York Times wrote an article in which Mr. Ailes mocked the infomercials that CNBC runs on weekends (for “nose tweezers and pimple squeezers,” he said), while accusing the channel’s management of copying Fox before it was even on the air by making moves like labeling itself “America’s Business Channel.”

Photo

Roger Ailes, the head of the Fox Business Network.Credit
Reed Saxon/Associated Press

When I spoke to him, he was no less inflammatory. “They’ve decided recently that America is not such a terrible place and capitalism isn’t so bad”—another reaction, he seemed to be saying, to the prospect of some new pro-America competition. “They used to get really excited if a C.E.O. was going to jail and they got depressed if a company announced a profit. They are offended by rich people unless it’s them.” He paused before delivering the punch line. “That’s because they all went to journalism school.”

Now, anyone who has spent more than five minutes watching CNBC knows these allegations are laughable; it would be hard to imagine a channel more pro profit than CNBC. But Mr. Ailes needs a way to differentiate his new network, and this was one of his tried-and-true tacks: accuse the other side of a lack of patriotism. “We don’t view capitalism, corporations or profits as the enemy,” he said. “If the guys at Enron did bad, they paid for it,” he added. “But there are 9,000 other companies whose executives go to church or synagogue, and make contributions, and want America to be a great country. And it is not treason to not treat them like bad guys.” Et cetera.

Earlier, I had interviewed Neil Cavuto, Fox Business’s star anchor and managing editor, who sought to differentiate his channel in another way. “We don’t use jargon, and we don’t use analysts,” he said. “We’re not afraid to defy what seems to be conventional wisdom. Let’s not buy lock, stock and barrel what everyone else says. Let’s not assume that all mortgages are melting down and all companies are crooked.”

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The lack of jargon is one thing that is instantly noticeable on Fox Business — often for the good. For instance, the stock prices that run at the bottom of the screen spell out the name of the company rather than relying solely on the ticker symbol. They are also categorized by sector, which is a helpful touch. At one point during the week, both channels went to the commodities exchange. On CNBC, Rick Santelli spewed out incomprehensible acronyms and numbers in that rapid-fire style of his, while Fox tried to explain things more simply — including pointing out that commodity futures would eventually “translate into the price of your groceries.”

Sometimes, however, the reach for simplicity was not such a good thing. A new commentator named Eric Bolling — a trader who also defected from CNBC, which has taken him to court for violating the terms of his contract — was described as a “Wall Street guru,” thus giving his views a weight they don’t remotely deserve.

Always, there was an effort to connect the stories not so much to the price of a company’s stock, but to our daily lives. “Biotech stocks are risky,” read one Fox blurb — which of course is where CNBC would have stopped. The Fox blurb continued, “But the products save lives.”

And always there was that knee-jerk Fox impulse to see the glass as half full. All week long, it ran stories and segments about the housing decline — except that its stories tended to emphasize not how big a problem it was, but how many people out there were still buying homes, despite everything.

I got the sense, when I spoke to the brass at CNBC, that they’re a little baffled so far by the Fox Business approach. “We are focused on investors and the news that moves investments,” said CNBC’s president, Mark Hoffman. “Our audience is the 60 percent of the households in this country that own a stock or a bond or a mutual fund.” A result of that narrow focus has been record profits; most industry analysts expect CNBC to earn more than $300 million next year.

To be honest, I’m baffled, too. Clearly, Fox is aiming for a different, broader audience than CNBC — perhaps the same conservative audience that propelled Fox News. Mr. Ailes and Mr. Cavuto both seem more than a little contemptuous of the core CNBC audience — “I’m not going to be satisfied saying I wooed some day traders,” Mr. Cavuto said.

But business news is much harder than political news to transform into the blue state-red state divide that Fox News has always trafficked in. More to the point, perhaps, for the vast majority of people who are interested in business news, their initial point of entry is the stock market. And that is still what they mainly care about. What CNBC offers is information that the day trader — and Wall Street professional — can act on, while also giving the rest of us a mix of white noise and real news that allows us to at least feel as though we know what is going on in the market, where our retirement funds reside. Mr. Cavuto likes to say that the stock market is not always the most important business story on most days. He’s right — except if you’re running a business channel. For someone in his job, the stock market is always the most important story.

Which, I’m guessing, Mr. Ailes will eventually figure out, and which is also why it would be foolish to discount the Fox Business Network based on its first week. The real question is what will happen once Fox Business realizes that the stock market is the only road that makes sense, Mr. Cavuto’s sensibilities be damned. That’s when the battle will start.

“I think someone will win,” Mr. Ailes said. “I’m not saying there isn’t room for both CNBC and the Fox Business network. But one of them will do better, make more money and be the one that more people gravitate to.”

He smiled. “That will take a few more years,” he said.

Correction: October 24, 2007

A picture caption on Saturday with the Talking Business column in Business Day, about a new business television channel started by Rupert Murdoch, misidentified the channel. It is the Fox Business Network, not the Fox Financial Network.